Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior (19 page)

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Authors: James McBride Dabbs,Mary Godwin Dabbs

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BOOK: Heroes, Rogues, & Lovers: Testosterone and Behavior
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Page 68
but focused, fixed on the task, impatient with complexity."
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Recently, students Rebecca Campo, Rebecca Strong, and Rhonda Milun, psychologist Frank Bernieri, and I have studied presence in high- and low-testosterone men and women. We measured testosterone levels in 358 subjects and videotaped them as they participated in a series of experiments. In the experiments, we asked each subject to walk into a room and speak to a person or to a camera. We scored their speed of movement, patterns of gaze, and general demeanor. We found that high-testosterone subjects entered the room less hesitantly, looked around less, and focused more directly on the task before them than low-testosterone subjects did. Overall, high-testosterone subjects seemed more purposeful and confident. They seemed to have more presence.
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Panache and presence can turn up almost anywhere. Marian Hargrove, who collected saliva samples from female prison inmates in a study that will be described in Chapter 4, found a striking example in one of the prisoners. Diana (I've used a different name to protect her privacy) was a tall, attractive woman with an alert, confident manner. She stood up straight and looked people directly in the eye. Hargrove said that Diana wasn't overtly aggressive or physically threatening, nor was she "scary looking" like some of the other prisoners. Nevertheless, Diana seemed to get away with ignoring minor prison rules. Hargrove gave Diana a stick of chewing gum to facilitate saliva flow for the experiment. Chewing gum was forbidden in the cell blocks, and Diana knew she was supposed to spit the gum out after she donated her saliva, but she kept it in her mouth. She was quiet about the gum until she left the research room. Then she flaunted it and chewed it in front of the guards. Instead of telling her to spit it out, two guards called the sergeant with whom Hargrove was working. They reported, "Diana's chewing gum." After another similar call, Hargrove asked the sergeant, "Why don't they just ask her to spit it out?" The sergeant replied, ''Diana has unseen powers." When the saliva samples were assayed, Diana turned out to be high in testosterone, just as Hargrove had expected.
In or out of jail, strong peoplethrough physical prowess, political skill, ability to inspire, or talent for projecting "unseen powers"exert strong influence over others. Among people and animals, presence has an element of fearlessness, which contributes to that influence. Animals injected with testosterone show striking changes in behavior.
 
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Mice, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, are less fearful of strange places after they get testosterone injections.
66
Cows injected with testosterone become dominant in their herds. They seem fearless in strange situations and do not hesitate when they enter new pastures, and they show indifference when attacked by other cows.
67
John Wayne's archetypical American hero persona conveyed fearlessness without audacity or flamboyance. The strong, silent type played so well by Wayne presents an image of dominance in some cultures but not in others. Psychologist Harry Triandis, in his book
Culture and Social Behavior
, explained how opposite masculine styles resulted in a cross-cultural misunderstanding that contributed to the Persian Gulf War.
68
In 1990 Secretary of State James Baker was calm, cool, and blandly unexpressive when he told the Iraqis that the United States would attack Iraq if they did not get out of Kuwait. The Iraqis, who go for exaggeration rather than understatement in masculine displays, did not take Baker seriously. They assumed that if he had meant business, he would have shouted threats, pounded the table, and maybe thrown something.
The strong, silent John Wayne strategy may not work in Iraq, but it comes naturally for many men. There is some indication that high levels of testosterone are associated with blunted feelings, and to the extent this is true, showing no feeling may not always be an act. On the average, men smile less than women, perhaps because men feel less pleasure than women or because they don't want others to think they are trying to be nice. Men underscore their lack of expressiveness with beards, which obscure their smiles.
*
Smiling is not just a sign of good feeling. It is polite, disarming, and nonthreatening. It is a strategy that people with less power use more often than people with greater power. The sex difference is part of an ancient pattern in which women maintain community by smiling and men maintain dominance by not smiling. The pattern holds today, in business meetings and social settings. Men not only smile less, but as anyone who watches talk shows on television knows, they are less expressive about their own feelings and less concerned with the feelings of others. Women's unhappiness with silent and unresponsive mates
*
In Chapter 7, I will describe studies showing that high-testosterone men smile least of all.
 
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has become a cliché of the talk show circuit and was an inspiration for a brief study by a student of mine. She wore a large bandage on one of her fingers for several weeks and kept a record of how people reacted. Women who saw the bandage were sympathetic. Men just wanted to know what had happened.
Men gain credit in each other's eyes for their fearless behavior. Athletes try to intimidate and "psych out" their opponents; it would be interesting to know whether male athletes use this strategy more than females do. Stephen Potter wrote a book,
The Complete Upmanship
, on how to win by making your opponent nervous. His starting axiom was "the first muscle stiffened is the first point gained."
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Men try to look as if they have everything under control, even when they do not, hoping to solve the problem before anyone learns they are bluffing. They keep driving when lost, refusing to stop and ask directions, looking unperturbed, not straining forward to search for missing street signs, pretending nothing is wrong. One of my students found a good spot to study the behavior of people who were lost. She worked in a building that had an express elevator, which she rode regularly. People unfamiliar with the building would enter the elevator and discover they didn't know how to get to their floor. When this happened to women, they asked her for help. Men seldom asked for help, preferring to go to the wrong place rather than admit they did not know what they were doing. Being lost does not convey toughness and authority.
In the minds of most people, toughness, leadership, and authority have a particular look and sound. Joseph Kennedy understood that. He told his children that it mattered less what they were like than what people thought they were like.
70
Movies and television have intensified the role of dress, voice, and physical appearance in conveying the impression of strength and dominance. In contrast to some of the eccentric-looking and -sounding old-timers in the television news business and the Friday night gangs who get together on PBS, Dan Rather is a good example of the trend. Rather did not become an anchorman just because he knew about current events. His craggy features, authoritative voice, and knowledge of when to wear a red scarf, a trench coat, or a safari shirt helped, too. Although there are exceptions, leaders, like anchormen, need to look the part, and they need to sound right for the part, too.
Low-pitched voices add to the authority of men, women, and other
 
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animals. Perhaps a low voice makes a person sound big and strong, because throughout the animal world, deeper vocal sounds are associated with greater size and strength.
71
The pitch of the voice appears to be correlated with testosterone levels. Researchers know that testosterone lowers the voices of developing adolescent males, and we suspect that it lowers the voices of adult men and women according to how much is present. Preliminary findings indicate that surgeons, who have the reputation for being the most macho group among doctors, have lower-pitched voices than internists.
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There have been studies showing higher testosterone related to lower voice pitch among male opera singers.
73
At Georgia State University, we have studied how testosterone levels are related to differences in voice pitch in both men and women. So far, we have found a correlation between high testosterone and low voice pitch in men, but not in women.
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We think that further research might reveal conditions under which the correlation would hold for women, too. Endocrinologists have told me that treating female patients with testosterone, especially in larger doses, can result in a temporary drop in voice pitch.
In Pat Conroy's
The Great Santini
, the colonel tells an officer under his command to forget about ever being a real leader, because his voice is too high-pitched.
75
With generally higher-pitched voices than men, women, on average, have to work harder to convey authority with their voices. I know an Army general who was unhappy when a woman became head of the cadets at West Point, because she did not have the "stentorian voice" that would carry on the parade ground.
Like voices, faces convey strength or weakness. Some researchers have suggested that testosterone shapes the faces of men and women differently, and there is a report that men who are higher in testosterone have larger jaws.
76
In another study, researchers asked a group of students to look at pictures from an old West Point yearbook and rate the young men pictured according to how dominant they looked. The ruggedly handsome men, those with strong features and square jaws, were rated high in dominance. They were also more likely to have been cadet leaders and to have achieved higher rank by the time they retired from active duty.
77
Handsomeness helps men in the business world, too, and it helps men more than beauty helps women, because many people believe that attractive women lack intellectual ability.
78
Hollywood's
 
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portrayal of "dumb blondes," made famous by Judy Holiday and Marilyn Monroe, reinforced the idea that feminine beauty and brains don't go together. The weathered, craggy look of hard experience does not diminish masculine attractiveness or perceptions of masculine ability. Like a German dueling club member's
Schmiss
, scars can enhance a manly image. I read about an engineer whose face had been disfigured when he was trying to identify a peculiar noise in a piece of heavy machinery. His ear was pressed against it when it exploded. His coworkers viewed his scar as the badge of a hero who has been through it all, survived, and learned the dangers of the world. He became a legend in his company, and the other engineers treated him with great respect. They sought his opinions and his approval.
79
Being tough, ignoring broken bones and other kinds of pain and discomfort, is a masculine characteristic that spans time and culture. Tom Wolfe described fighter pilots with the "right stuff." They risked their lives routinely and never expressed fear or mentioned danger. One of these, Chuck Yeager, was the first pilot to break the sound barrier, and he did it with two broken ribs. He'd had a horseback riding accident two nights before, and not wanting to be grounded, he kept his injuries secret from his superiors. British colonialists in East Africa admired the Masai, who could walk for miles on a broken leg and show no pain. Some military assignments require routine stoicism, a fact appreciated by General Charles Anderson, former head of the Tennessee National Guard. He manned the tanks of his star military unit with country boys who were used to discomfort. The dirt, grease, and 120-degree heat inside the tanks did not bother them.
While bravery in the face of discomfort and danger is generally associated with masculinity, many women are braver than most men. Women served as nurses on the battlefields of the Crimean War, crossed the North American continent with pushcarts in midnineteenth century migrations, and faced armed and violent Alabama state troopers during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The traits discussed in this chapter are statistically linked to testosterone and to men, but they can be present in individual women. It is important to keep in mind that masculinity and femininity are on a continuum, with more men at the masculine end and more women at the feminine end, but with a great deal of overlap in between.

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